L.M. (Laura Maria) Breuer

Accounting information serves a central role in compensation contracting and corporate governance. Important recent developments in business and society, such as the changing nature of corporate reporting, companies’ use of new communication and reporting channels, and the growing availability of detailed, large-scale compensation data, force us to rethink what we know about the use of accounting in governing managers and companies. Has accounting become too complex or subjective to be useful for contracting and governance? Does the periodic disclosure of more and more non-accounting information change the nature of contracting and governance? Do more informal and timelier ways of interaction between managers and stakeholders, such as through social media, change the way in which managers are monitored? Can new large-scale datasets or data collection methods, such as web-scraping and textual analysis, help us to explore novel research questions in accounting, compensation, and governance? The purpose of this Ph.D. project is to identify and examine questions such as these, thereby contributing to an improved understanding of how accounting, and other forms of information, can help to ensure the efficient governance of modern companies.